Originally posted by: Z6PO
The shot by itself is perfectly done, but it's because of the following shot that it doesn't work well. In a movie, when you follow a moving object from shot to shot, the object must always go in the same direction. But here, we have the falcon exiting hyperspace and going from the top to the bottom of the picture, and then in the next shot she goes from the bottom to the top! It puzzles the viewer: did the falcon just turned back?
The shot by itself is perfectly done, but it's because of the following shot that it doesn't work well. In a movie, when you follow a moving object from shot to shot, the object must always go in the same direction. But here, we have the falcon exiting hyperspace and going from the top to the bottom of the picture, and then in the next shot she goes from the bottom to the top! It puzzles the viewer: did the falcon just turned back?
Think of how many times you've seen a car drive up to and over a camera (bottom to top) and then the shot switches to the reverse angle and the car drives over and away from the camera (top to bottom).
It works there and it works here as well. Because the Falcon is passing underneath the camera, that's where we expect it to emerge from. There's probably some fancy terminology to describe this certain type of screen direction but I'm too drunk to remember and too tired to look it up.
Bottom line: there's nothing wrong with the relationship between those two shots.